I will not take long, because there will be a vote at 5:15 and we will have to go to the House to vote on a motion put forward by the Bloc Québécois. So yes, our time is limited.
I have a question just for Mr. Brown, if I may. You raised the issue from a particular point of view. We certainly understand from your testimony—at least this is what Mr. Ménard was implying—that the criminal justice system is not necessarily the right approach in some cases. Up to that point, I can follow the direction in which we are headed.
As you know, there was a major anti-smoking campaign. From the point of view of the criminal justice system at the moment, it looks like we are attacking smokers. And yet, the anti-smoking campaign attacked the product, and not the smoker, by increasing the price of cigarettes. At the moment, the price of a carton of 20 packages of cigarettes is $72, while a case of 24 beers costs about $32.
Do you think our first approach should be to attack people who produce beer? Because this is the first component of the problem—the beer producer.
Second, have you looked at the possibility of having beer, which has a 4.1% alcohol content for 341 millilitres, being sold still as beer but with a lower percentage of alcohol—such as 2% or 3%? As you know, a person's ability to imbibe beer is limited: when someone has drunk a case of 24 beers with an alcohol content of 2%, he cannot drink any more.
Could you not suggest some approaches along these lines? Have you looked at this option? At the moment, we want to put everyone in prison, we all want to find a solution to the problem, we're all good people, but we are not targeting the product, even though it is the product that is causing the problem. In the case of cigarettes, the campaign worked because of the advertising and the fact that the price of cigarettes was increased so much that smoking almost became a luxury. Could we not consider doing something like this?